Ranting about Linux on the Desktop

I am a long-time advocat of FOSS and the philosophy behind it. But from
time to time I despair with this attitude. Currently, the “Linux on the
Desktop” topic is most prominently making me think on what goes wrong.

This article is written on a laptop with Ubuntu. My wife’s laptop runs
Ubuntu, because I convinced her to switch. Our desktop computer runs Ubuntu.
It’s one of those rare machines, that Dell sold with Linux instead of
Windows. At the university I use Debian, and at work I come in touch with
Ubuntu and SUSE servers.

Recently the
editorial in the German c't magazine
critizied the Linux desktop as not ready for the broad masses. My spontanous
thought was: He is wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the Linux deskop
experience. Then I started to think again. More than that I have now two
updates from Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 behind me. And I must revide my first
judgment: I am not amused. And Linux desktop environments are not
ready for day-to-day use of people without technical background, at least in
their full potential.

What Goes Wrong

Let me start with a small example: After upgrading last year from 10.04 to
10.10 I switched to the new dark GTK theme that
came with that release exclusively developed by Canonical. A big mistake. It looked
cool and fresh, but it is completely unusable. Every once in a while the
top-right logout button vanishes because of some
graphics flaw. This is simply unacceptable for the default UI
of a operating system. And it is reproducable on two of my three Ubuntu desktop
machines. And it had never happended with any other Gnome theme
I used so far.

Why is it unacceptible? Because it robs the single most important button
from the unexperienced user: the shutdown button. Of course, there are other
options to shut down the machine, but if in a hurry most people will only come
up with pressing the power button. And doing this regularly, at some point
ext4 will go mad about it. Completely untouched is the topic, that the user
will lose the trust in the OS. I wouldn’t trust a car, where the
driving wheel vanishes from time to time.

Absolute No-Gos

Then there is the upgrade issue. On my old HP laptop the upgrade went well.
I rebooted and came to Unity, tested it and was quite pleased with this new
UI style. Then, after 2 or 3 hours, it crashed. It, let me emphasize this,
f***ing crashed. No Gnome session ever crashed on me, apart from the
ones where I did strange stuff to the GDM. Two days later Unity did it
again.

My promise to Canonical is this: If Unity does this ever while I’m writing
on my Ph.D. thesis, I’m off to Fedora.

Even with this experience I decided to upgrade the desktop computer, because
I had some spare time. If I only hadn’t done that. The machine was configured
to auto-log in my wife after booting. After the upgrade restart, it did exactly
that, and then the desktop froze.

The details on how I fixed it finally can be read in this
SuperUser question. To put it in a nutshell: The upgrade switched under the
hood the working proprietary nVidia driver against Nouveau, which is known to
have issues with the Compiz effects in the new Ubuntu. Thank You,
Canonical!

To remind the gentle reader: I bought my desktop computer from Dell with
Ubuntu pre-installed. One would think, that this is one hardware configuration
Canonical tests its system before rollout.

What’s My Problem?

I fixed everything, so what? Well, I have several years of experience with
computers. Most of my relatives haven’t. They would have had no
possibility to fix any of those above issues without someone in the field.

Upgrading from WinXP to Windows 7 is not trivial. Macs are upgraded by
buying new hardware. But both can be handled by PEBKAC types of users. And if the Ubuntu
update reminder shows a prominent “new version available” button, the linked
action should be possible to finish for everyone being able to handle basic
tasks on a computer.

LTS versions are not an option. They shift only the time frame. And besides,
browsing with Firefox 3.5 today doesn’t make that much fun anymore (I do this
at the university). Since buying the desktop computer, I would have anyways
be forced to update from 8.04 to 10.04.

Put that together with all the other subtleties like trying to get a
Samsung multi-functional printer to work, I can now finally say: At the
time of writing these lines, Linux is not ripe for usual desktop users.
This is hard for me to admit. And I take hope from the advance of Android and
other Linux-based user interfaces, e.g. in TV set-top boxes. But using the
distribution, that claims to be “Linux for Human Beings” has really sobered
me.

In the long term, and with devices blending and interacting more and more,
I assume, that Linux itself will have a wonderful future, though. I’m looking
forward to it.